Ep #56: Blame and Personal Responsibility

Welcome to More Than Mindset, the only podcast that bridges the gap between spirituality and success. Go beyond the mind with clarity and confidence coach Kim Guillory and learn how to integrate your passion to serve with your skills and experience to create a business you love. Let’s get started.

Hey, my lovely listeners. How are you this week? I have some treats coming up for you. I interviewed one of my favorite clients today. That’ll be coming out soon, and I have another one that I’ll be interviewing next week. I’m excited. I’m kind of debating on how I’m going to distribute these. If I should do them all in a row or just do every 10 episodes.

So, let me know. What do you want to hear? Do you want to hear more stories, people who are implementing the work, coaches, or who are helping other people implement the work? What would help you on your own personal journey? Let me know. Send me an email. You guys know I like some personal feedback.

All right. Let’s talk about this mood that everyone has. I’m laughing, but it’s kind of rough this week. Everyone that I am speaking to is telling me how terrible their mood is. Like, “I’m mad at everyone. I’m mad at the traffic. I’m mad at my husband. I’m mad at my kids and the dog. Everyone is a problem.”

I’m like, “Okay, this is happening way too often.” It can’t possibly be personal. There must be something universal going on. Right? I do believe Mercury is in retrograde. So, for one thing, we’re surely revisiting all this stuff that annoys us most. Knock us back into alignment, you could say.

Anyway, I had a life coach call this evening and that’s what it was about again. I was like, “This is fascinating.” I was talking to a couple of friends earlier this week and at least four clients telling me the same thing and a couple of people again this morning. It’s like their story is almost identical, and yet they’re all blaming something different. So, I was like, great topic for the podcast this week.

We’re going to talk about blame because think about what you would be doing if you didn’t have anyone or anything to blame. If it wasn’t PMS, it wasn’t the job, it wasn’t the kids, it wasn’t the annoying husband, the person who cut you off in traffic. What would you have to do if you had no rational reason of why you were feeling the way you were feeling? It was just sensation in your body.

What would you do? Carry it around with you? Would you try to change it? If it was no one’s fault that you were feeling it, it was all yours, you had 100% personal responsibility for where it came from, for what to do with it. Pretty interesting. Ask your brain. See if you could put it to work. I want to talk a little bit about that, and we’re going to talk a lot about blaming and personal responsibility.

So, let’s start with talking a little bit about directing your brain. Here it is. Your brain is a processor, not a storage tank or a trash can for your thoughts. If you want it to process, you want it to work for you, you have to tell it what you want it to do. If it’s busy blaming, looking for who to blame, looking for who’s the troublemaker, then it can’t process and problem solve.

It can only do one thing at a time, and you were telling it to blame, to find out who did this. How can we make it different? Whose fault is it? Who can we change rather than taking personal responsibility, letting everyone else be everyone else, not expecting them to be different, and then put your mind to work to solve the problem that you want solved? Why am I feeling this way?

What am I thinking to cause this emotion, this sensation in my body, that’s making me act out and blame people? That’s the action you take whenever you’re thinking it’s someone else’s fault. That’s an action. You’re looking to see who is to blame. That’s the action that you take, looking to see whose fault it is, looking who we can change here.

Then you stay in the same exact mess because you can’t change anyone else to change yourself. You have to put yourself in the thought line, like your thoughts are about you. What am I doing to create this? What am I thinking when I feel this way? What do I do? That’s taking personal responsibility.

So, let’s see how many things you have blamed. I’m going to go out on a limb and think that all of you have felt the same moody mess that we have. Maybe you live in Florida and you’re in the sun, and maybe it’s because we haven’t seen sun in five or six weeks. It might be that. Let me just put that there.

Do you blame the weather? Do you blame hormones, kids? Is it the time zone? How about the news? The politicians? What else can you blame? Maybe it’s because it was Mardi Gras last week. It was a holiday. Maybe it’s your job, or your boss, your co-worker. What else have you been blaming? Why are you not getting the result you want? Whose fault is it?

Write all of that down. You know I’m a great teacher of writing, of journaling. You have to get it out of your head because as long as it’s spinning in your head, you think it’s truth. When you put it on paper, you can see it’s a thought. Then you could change it. But if you keep it in your head, you won’t change it. You’re going to keep rationalizing, excusing, explaining and blaming.

All right. If no one was responsible for the way you were feeling except for you, and you were not arguing with what is, you would just completely quit arguing, wanting things to be different, and you were just willing to allow and accept that this is something that you are creating in your own body.

Here, I’m going to give you an emotional fitness test to see what grade you’re in. Do people piss you off? Do they hurt you? Do they annoy you? Do you think people are stupid? I had to put that one because it’s so true. We’re like, “Oh, my God. They’re so dumb. They’re so stupid or ignorant.” Right? We’re crazy like that. You just got to always be willing to turn it around. If you’re saying that about someone else, always ask yourself, “Or am I being stupid?”

Do other people need to change in order for you to be happy? Do you need a different job in order for you to be happy? Should your kids behave differently? Should they get better grades? Should they be better in sports? Should they have more friends? Should they be more popular? Do you need to live somewhere else for you to have pleasure and joy?

This one is on me. Who was I talking to someone earlier this morning was when I was on a coach call, and she said she was going to, and venture out and do new hikes, new trails, and go and discover new things in the neighborhoods. Oh, I know it is. I was instantly jealous like, “That’s not fair. I don’t have that.”

I told her that. I was laughing. I was like, “Oh, listen to me pointing the finger. It’s where I live. That’s the problem.” Where I live, it’s called a Ville Platte, which means flat town. That’s the actual meaning of the words. But we do have Chicot Park nearby, and in Chicot, we do have hills, and we have trails, but it’s not in my backyard. I have to drive 20 minutes or so to get to it.

Anyway, so if you answered yes to any of these about people pissing you off, annoying you, they have a problem, they need to change, then you may have some work to do. How can we get you to the position to start asking yourself the question to inquire so that your brain can give you the answer of where do I piss myself off? Where do I hurt myself? When am I being annoying? What do I need to change for myself to be happy?

That’s taking personal responsibility. When you can turn the questions around, you can ask yourself, “When I say he, she, they, am I willing to put me and I in the spot?” Start playing with this, guys. Let me know how it goes for you.

So, do you have the ability to feel negative emotion without reacting? Reacting would be blaming, pointing the finger, or wanting to change the world or someone in it, wanting to change the environment, the laws, the rules, all of those things. What is your ability to feel negative emotion without freaking the flip out? That’s the question. On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you answer that? I’m like a 2, or I’m like a 10. I got it. Easy, breezy. No problem.

Let me tell you what we do, especially you coaches out there. We use coaching against ourselves. We think that coaching is supposed to make us feel better all of the time, and that is a setup for suffering. I’ll tell you that right now. Because if you try to feel good all the time, you are arguing with reality.

Listen, you’re not going to want to feel good when your best friend dies. You’re going to want to be sad. You’re not going to want to feel those emotions. You are not going to want to be happy when you’re fighting with your partner. Seriously, stop trying to do that. That’s bypassing.

So, they have spiritual bypassing. That’s when you’re like, “Oh, it’s all good. Doing it for the grace of God.” Then you have thought processing where you just change the thought so it can be all about unicorns and butterflies. That is not what we’re saying here. You want to use coaching to grow emotionally and mentally. You want to be able to manage your thoughts and regulate your emotions through thought work.

So, if you’re using coaching against yourself, it would be like avoiding all of the crappy feelings and thinking that you need to feel good all of the time. So, you use coaching to get you in that state by giving you positive affirmations and thoughts that you would want to feel, want to think, want to say. In other words, you’re thinking something negative, and then you just take a positive thought, and then you try to feel good about the positive thought.

You will not be able to because it’s not true to you. It’s not really what you’re thinking. It’s not going to work. It might work for a little while, but just know that it’s bypassing, and you are not going to evolve and grow as a human. You are not going to graduate into the next level of emotional fitness. You’re going to stay at 1st grade, or 5th grade, or whatever it is, whatever level you want to do.

You know I don’t like labels. I say that all the time, but I do like scales so that you can see where you are. I like numbers, things that can prove. Like you want to get on the scale every week and see if you gained or lost. You want to get out of denial. You want to look at your bank balance. You want to know how many clients you had this week. You want to know how many consults you did. You want to know how many donuts you ate.

Get real about the numbers, facts, facts, facts, because when you don’t have facts, you start fooling yourself just like you start bypassing these negative emotions. You hand them off. “Here, that’s his fault.” My partner who did whatever, whatever, I’m going to give him my negative emotions.

That way, I don’t have to deal with them. That way, I don’t have to feel them. I don’t have to change anything about myself. I don’t have to get out of denial. I can just stay in fairytale land, and I could just put the blame on someone else and rationalize it. Guys, that is not going to work for you.

Let me tell you something. You are here to grow and evolve. You’re not here to sit around, and be entitled, and play victim and martyr. It’s not fun. I know all about it. I did it for many, many, many years, and clients come to me because they are doing it. They don’t like it either. No one wants to be the victim, or the martyr, or the sad person, no one. We don’t want to do that. That’s a terrible idea.

Every single morning, that’s a terrible idea. You don’t want to get on the bike. You know what? It’s cold. You should stay here. You don’t want that salad. Get some fried chicken. It’s like the little bad friend. You remember in school the one who always wanted to get in trouble? They always wanted to do the thing that was funny, and then we all got in trouble for it.

Your brain is like that. It’s like the little angel and the little devil. You got this one in part of you, this cognitive dissonance. You got part of you that’s telling you all this beautiful, lovely stuff that you want to experience, and then you got this other one like, “Nah, that won’t be fun. Let’s get over here. We don’t want to do that. That’s way too serious.”

So, you’re constantly fighting your primal brain against your frontal cortex. There’s like here’s your ration and reason, and then here’s your freak out. It’s like there’s this challenge going on, and only one can win. Which one do you want to win? What do you want? Do you want to evolve? Do you want to grow?

Do you want to get more comfortable at feeling uncomfortable feelings? Or do you want to keep denying, throwing them around, blaming, I’ll say like vomiting them on other people. Like, “Here, take my yuck. I don’t want it,” and you just kind of throw it up on someone else. That’s a terrible idea.

All right. Especially you healers. Let me tell you something. You guys are addicted to healing. You think you should not be feeling anything negative. You should never be sad. You should never be depressed. You should never be in pain. You should never feel remorse, or regret, or shame, or jealousy, or envy. You think it’s bad and sinful. It’s not. It is human.

I am speaking to myself also. I do not like to feel shame, negative emotion. I do not like to feel like I need anyone. I often catch myself not being compassionate to myself because I should know better than that. I should get it done already. It’s a setup that is denying your human condition.

Sorry to say, but this soul jumped into this bodysuit to have a human experience. Not a heavenly experience, but a human experience, and the human experience comes with all of the emotions, negative and positive, happy and sad, mad and glad, all of it. It’s like a rainbow. It’s like Skittles. Just a whole bunch of different things. You get to pick which one you want by changing your thought.

If you want to feel desire, then think thoughts, desirable thoughts. You want to fall in love with your partner again, make a list of all the amazing things about them. Listen, your list may just be three things, but focus on those three things until he’s desirable. Look at the things that are working and go to town to grow those.

Same thing with your moods. Instead of blaming other people, or bypassing, pointing the finger or pretending it’s not true, denying it. Instead, allow it and like, “Oh, well, isn’t this kind of shitty? Hm, interesting. I wonder where this is coming from.”

Guys, it could be that you just woke up and you’re carrying the residue or the residual emotion from your dream, something that your mind did while you were asleep. Then you take it and make it out to mean it’s something bad or you shouldn’t be feeling it. It’s just a mood. It’s just an emotion. It’s just some sensation.

Go to town. Become a detective. Get to work. Dig it up. Unveil it. Then take a different direction. Change the trajectory. What you typically normally would do when you’re in the mood, which is to blame, to point the finger, to deny, to avoid, instead of doing that, you want to navigate so that you can change the neural pathway.

So, instead of doing the typical pointing outside of yourself, go inside of yourself and inquire. That’s not me. That’s not what I want to do. That’s not how I want to behave, and that’s not how I want to feel. This is how I want to feel, and then do that. That’s going to create the mood that you want to be in. You’re going to grow desire for more of that mood by thinking about it, and then feeling it. Then fill it long enough until you create the imprint in your body so that you have the memory of it, and you can come back to it several times throughout the day however many times you need.

Then you just choose it like, “I choose to feel that way today, I commit to it 100%.” I cultivate it as if it were put on your red lipstick, put on your high heels, put up your hair, put on a smile. Cultivate it as if it already were. I promise you this works. You just continue doing that, and then you have created it. It’s a beautiful process. That is the punchline approach. It’s the simple five steps to create anything on purpose.

You have to be present to the problem, first and foremost. You have to be self-aware. You have to know that you’re doing this. You have to recognize it. You have to wake up to be enlightened, to be in the light. Don’t be in the shadow. The shadow is just buying into the mood.

You’re like, “Nope. What’s happening here? Let’s turn on the light and take a look.” Then you unveil it, unpack it. Is that true? Is that their fault? Who is annoying? Is it me? Is it them? Unpack the story so that you can understand it. You just want to peel away the layers, unveil it, navigate, which is just changing the trajectory, changing the neural pathway.

You do this over, and over, and over, and over, and over until you create the new pathway. It becomes the new habit. Remember, habits and behaviors are just something that we do repeatedly, unconsciously. We just want to now do them on purpose. Create the vision of what you really want to be, what you want to become. Start living that now by deciding, and committing, and cultivating, and continuing to do it every single day. If it’s not working for you, get some coaching. Get some coaching.

Come into the More Than Mindset group. I do free coaching in there. We have Facebook lives, and then I do actual live coaching calls where I will coach you personally. So, if you are not one of my clients, one of my coaches, this is the only other way that you can get coaching by me.

Now, if you need more attention, just raise your hand in the group, speak up. Do the challenges that we offer in there. Don’t just be someone sitting on the sideline. Actually be an active participant. If you’re not, ask yourself the question, why am I not raising my hand? Why am I not showing up for myself? Why am I not asking these questions? Why am I not doing any of this work?

Seriously, ask yourself the questions and listen for the answer because if you ask the question to yourself and you listen, you will get the answer, and you will get the solution. If not, start back at the peak, come back to presence, unveil again. These stories run really deep, guys.

Here’s what happens. If you don’t write it down, then you’re really believing what you’re thinking, and you’re not seeing that it’s really just a story. It’s just old habits and behaviors. Whatever your parents told you, your schoolteachers, your friends in high school or grade school, it’s just repeating history. That’s why you’re not getting the results that you want.

This is the same thing for you guys in business. If you are blaming, I am not making the money because people don’t know what coaching is. That’s one of your favorites. People don’t want to pay for this. People don’t want to do the work. They want to stay stuck.

I want you to turn all of that around. The people, the he, she, they, I want you to turn it all on yourself. I don’t believe in it. I don’t understand what it is. I don’t want to do the work. Seriously, this is like magic. I’m giving you some really good coaching here. Is it the location? Do you think it’s where you live? I challenge you even on that.

Put your brain to work and ask yourself out of everyone who lives here, who would want this? Think of five people. Write their names down. Get out. Go meet more people. I promise you, this is the cool thing. Once you think of those five people and you write their names down, you will run into them. It’s fascinating.

This is really how we materialize or manifest. You can call it manifesting. Just be careful that you’re not just sitting on the sofa eating Oreos manifesting. Make sure you’re taking some action, you’re doing some work, you’re getting into the belief, you’re filling it on all layers. You want to do all of that work. You don’t want to just sit there and pretend.

Then tell people what you do often. Put it on social media, offer help for free or for value. Educate them. Tell them about your experiences. Share your stories. Quit blaming and start working. Go inside instead of outside. Take personal responsibility for what you want. It is not the world’s problem how much money you want to make or what you want to create with your business. It is yours.

So, you get out there and you offer something so compelling, that they can’t tell you, they can’t turn it down. Make it so good and be in so much belief, that you won’t even have to do the marketing and advertising. They would just be flocking to you and being drawn, magnetized, into the reflection of the work, which is you getting your own results in advance. You become your first client. You do the work. You prove the process.

I am so sure about the punch line approach because it completely transformed my life, everything on every level. Mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually, financially, intellectually, occupationally, on all levels changed everything. It changed who I am in my community. It changed the way I think and feel about my community. My relationships, turned them completely around.

When you stop blaming people for your problems and you start taking personal responsibility, then you can make the changes to create new results. That’s what I have for you this week. Do your work. Let me know how it goes.

Share this podcast with your friends. Give me a rating and review. I’d really appreciate that. Going through the effort to put this out there. Let me know you’re listening. Sometimes I’ll get a message from someone telling me they’ve been listening for nine months. I had no idea. I’m like, “Guys, it’s so much funner when you share.”

Do you know that I have doubts too, that I spend a lot of time in shame and even confusion? Not sure if I’m doing it right. I don’t know if they’re hearing me. I don’t know if this is doing any good. Maybe I should quit. I should probably just give up. I think I could just go feed the birds in the backyard. Maybe I should just not do anything. I don’t know.

My brain tells me this stuff, guys, on a regular basis. I have to really do my work. I have to write it down. I have to watch it, and then I laugh about it. I don’t need TV because I can just watch my own thoughts. My brain is like a bully, bat shit crazy. So, I found a way to just get curious about why I was getting the results I was getting.

I did something about it. I quit blaming other people. I quit pointing the finger. I quit blaming my partner, my children. Actually, my children are not in the house anymore, so that made it easier. Go figure. It’s like, dang it. Where’s all the problems? The only thing left is me. I have to go inside.

I remember this about 10 years ago. I wanted a convertible, a puppy, or a camp on the water. I just thought that like turning 40 years old, and I ended up with a car with a sunroof, my sweet little Molly, and a camp. I was like, “Well, hello.” I didn’t realize it until after, like go figure. You put it out there, and then you forget about the how, and you just go to work on the living and the believing, and then suddenly, it’s all there.

Of course, I didn’t know until afterwards. This was before I was really this deep into work. I remember I had kids at home, and I would go away to the camp, and I was still miserable. I was like, “What’s happening? That bitch came with me.” Listen to me cussing today. Sorry about that. She came with me.

I for sure was the problem, but I had spent so many years trying to fix it outside of myself. I read so many books. I pointed so many fingers, I blamed so many people. I was miserable. Stop doing that. Wake up. Come join us. Let’s play. All right. That’s it. That’s what I have for you this week. Drop the blame and set yourself up for a better life by taking personal responsibility.

Listen, guys. If you are a professional, if you’re in the health and wellness business, and you’re interested in the mind body business, you’re welcome to reach out to me. Say, “Hey, Kim. I’d like to fill out an application. Tell me what it’s all about.” It will change your life and your career.

What I do is I help you implement my coaching tools with your skill set, your experiences, your passion to serve. We integrate, embody it spiritually, and then turn it into a viable business. So fun. A little bit of mindset, a little bit of soul work, and a little bit of business work. I teach you how to make money. Don’t worry about manifesting it when you know how to make it. All right. Till next week.

Thanks for listening to this episode of More Than Mindset.